SPOTSYLVANIA, Va. — Crushed by exhaustion, you may dream of a competitor’s head morphing into a Pokémon-like demon — and then open your eyes and still see it. The next day, you will quit the race.

To fill your queasy stomach during your third 112-mile bike ride, you will discover the best way to eat a sausage-and-egg sandwich: shove it in your mouth and let it slowly dissolve.

After 500 miles on a bike, 10 in the water and more than 100 on foot, it will make perfect sense to grab a branch and a broomstick in a desperate bid to propel yourself — like a giant mutant insect — the last 31 miles. It will not be enough. You will collapse on the road.

Seasick, miles into the swim, you will vomit. Twice.

Neck cramps will attack so fiercely on the bike that your head will slump. You will go cross-eyed and nearly crash.

The trees will keep moving. You will swear bugs are crawling over your face, even when they are not. The cracks in the road will form smiley faces. None of this is real — but it is 3 a.m., and you have dozens of miles still to run.

The sores from chafing are so bad you will think nothing of tugging open your shorts and squirting in ointment in full view of strangers. There is no modesty here; they seem to understand.

Actually, no. They don’t really understand. They are not competing in this race. And nobody not competing in this race understands.

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David Jepson was unable to hold up his head during the 560-mile bike leg. Despite injuries, including a blister the size of a golf ball, he was able to complete the 131-mile run and win his division.

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Christine Couldrey wept as she, dealing with painful blisters, pondered dropping out of the race. She ultimately finished.

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Shanda Hill being massaged by her father during the third day of the race. Hill took up ultratriathlons after she was hit by a car, ending her BMX racing career.

All that misery and more menaced the competitors who had decided, for their own unfathomable reasons, that a single Ironman race was not enough. They had entered an endurance event called the Virginia Quintuple Anvil Triathlon: five Ironman-length races, totaling 703 miles of swimming, biking and running, over five days.

All the legs were done in confined loops (30 laps in a section of the lake, 101 laps of a more-than-five-mile course for the bike and 75 laps of a nearly two-mile course for the run) at Lake Anna State Park, earning the course the nickname “the squirrel cage.”

The competitors — several of whom have formed a tight, familylike circle, having seen one another often at these kinds of races — were a mishmash of the superfit and the merely fit, military veterans (including a couple of former commandos), driven professionals and simple thrill-seekers who found plenty.

Most were middle-aged, most had grown children who would not miss them much in the long hours of training, and most had supportive spouses and family members — in some cases triathletes themselves.

Some of those family members came to watch their loved ones destroy their bodies, if not their minds, for nearly a week because … because … why? “If you have to ask,” more than a few racers replied, “you will never know.”

You may have heard that idea expressed at, say, the regular old Ironman triathlon, which is normally considered the Mount Everest of the sport: a 2.4-mile swim, then a 112-mile bike ride and then a marathon (26.2 miles) in the heat of Hawaii. If you could finish it, you were, well, an Ironman (or woman).

Then people began flocking to the challenge. Ironman grew. Races popped up on every continent except Antarctica. Even half-Ironman versions proliferated.

The first Ironman was in Hawaii in 1978, with 15 competitors. Today, there are 140 races to choose from, drawing 260,000 competitors.

But once you have swum 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles and run 26.2 miles in a day, why stop there?

As early as 1984, a double Ironman race was held in Alabama. And then a triple. And then a quintuple. And then a deca (10 Ironmans in 10 days) and a double deca, and you see where this is going.

Wayne Kurtz, who is considered the godfather of the so-called ultratriathletes, and seven others did 30 Ironman-length races in 30 days in Italy in 2013. He wrote about it in a book, “Stronger Than Iron.”

“With this kind of test,” he wrote, “these athletes were not racing for money or fame but purely to discover what is possible in terms of endurance limits.”

How did it go?

“I was hit by a car three times,” Kurtz said in an interview. “It was a zoo. We’re lucky nobody died.”

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These racers chose to complete five individual triathlons in five days but were required to abide by a 17-hour time limit each day. Others chose one continuous 703-mile race, broken up as they saw fit.

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After completing his swim on the first day of the competition, Jepson took this path to the start of the 560-mile bike leg.

That triple deca is considered the outer limit of physical performance. (One athlete recently claimed to have done 50 Ironmans in 50 days, but with some of that mileage done on an elliptical machine, traditionalists have scoffed.)

One of the more popular races is the Quintuple Anvil, which grew to 16 competitors this year from seven in 2013, its inaugural year. Double and triple versions are held at the same time. (By the time you consider a quadruple, you might as well just do a quintuple. That is the mentality here.)

“Anvil” is a tongue-in-cheek spin on “Ironman,” which is run by a large corporation fiercely protective of its trademark and not keen on letting other races use it. (An Ironman lawyer told the Anvil organizers a couple of years ago not to use “Ironman” in their materials.)

Competitors may choose one of two ways to mete out their self-flagellation: do one Ironman-length triathlon a day for five days, abiding by a 17-hour cutoff, or do all of it continuously — a 12-mile swim, followed by a 560-mile bike ride and a 131-mile run — stretched out over five and a half days, broken up however you wish.

The one-by-five variant means you can get a longish night’s sleep, but you have to get up for a 7 a.m. start every day — a fitness nut’s “Groundhog Day.”

The continuous version usually involves a fair amount of sleep deprivation, in particular to get the long bike and run legs done. This is the fitness nut’s “Walking Dead”: By the end, the mind is shot from exhaustion, and the legs and feet have taken so much punishment that hardly anybody is doing much running.

My own triathlon experience has been limited to a few “sprint” races of short distances, some Olympic-distance races (a swim of just under a mile, a 24-mile ride and a 6.2-mile run) and one half-Ironman (1.2-mile swim, 56-mile ride, 13.1-mile run).

The half-Ironman, done in the tropical heat of Panama, left me staggering at the end and had me pretty sure that I had found my limit — and it wasn’t happy to see me. Just beyond the finish line, there was a nice ice bath, which I felt like moving into permanently.

When I told this to Shanda Hill, who ended up one of the top finishers at the Anvil, she smiled and, with the evangelical fervor common among the racers, started pushing me to at least do an Ironman-length race.

“It’s all mental,” Hill, 34, said, “and I am living proof.”

By that, she meant that she had not devoted long hours to swimming, biking or running. But she did spend a lot of time in the gym and was also fit from a youth of championship BMX racing, a pursuit that ended several years ago when she was hit by a sport utility vehicle while riding a bike home.

She began running after that, moved up to ultramarathons and, before long, was doing her first Ironman, in 2014. Then came a double race, and by her logic, if you are going to move up to a triple, you might as well just do the quintuple.

This was her fifth triathlon over all, and like many of the other athletes, she would insist endurance triathlons had at least as much to do with the limits of the mind as with those of the body.

Lisa Wei-Haas, who did a double, said: “Shorter triathlons are about pain. Endurance triathlons are about suffering. How much suffering can you take?”

Everybody here found the answer. But not everybody finished. Not everybody got to bang that real anvil five times, as competitors do after crossing the finish line and parading, Olympic-style, with the flag of their country and their national anthem blaring from a tinny speaker.

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Dolph Hoch IV, a former military sniper, paced himself during the first few bike legs. His strategy had the added benefit of demoralizing his fellow competitors: “They had no idea I was saving my spin.”

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Turner, who lives not far from Lake Anna State Park, had the largest contingent of supporters at the Quintuple Anvil. The race rules allow competitors some assistance during rest periods, though the rest must be closely monitored.

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Jerome Libecki spent more than 300 miles of the bike leg in the wrong gear. He had slipped into the Quintuple Anvil field despite having never competed in a triathlon before.

Facing the Consequences

Facedown on a cot, near midnight in the middle of the race, Will Turner had a massage therapist kneading his muscles, trying to coax some life into them.

He was, at 58, an Ironman veteran who only last year moved up to multiple-distance races by doing a double Ironman-length race.

He believes in big dreams, he said, and he dedicated his entry to his late mother. This race, the continuous Quintuple Anvil, would also be a test toward a bigger goal: 60 Ironman-length races, one every six days, when he turned 60.

The test was not going well.

“I have been hanging out in the pain cave,” he said.

Like other racers, Turner had a group of people attending to him, although as a resident of nearby Richmond, he had more than anybody else.

He also had a table full of food and drinks.

At the beginning of the race, the tables and their goods were neatly arranged — water, electrolyte and muscle-recovery drinks, crackers, soups, cereal, cookies, doughnuts — under large party tents.

By the middle of the race, the tents resembled a MASH unit, littered with discarded gauze, wrappers, bottles and the other detritus from trying to keep a body in one piece.

The food game also intensified: pizzas, fast-food burgers, hot dogs — real food loaded with calories and carbohydrates to sustain long periods of exercise.

“May I have a pumpkin bread?” Turner asked as he eased to his feet and prepared to run while a friend fished out his request from the table.

“This is the most I will ever be pampered in my life,” Turner said with a tight smile he would wear even in some of the more painful moments ahead.

The race rules allow for such assistance, but the competitors must keep track of the rest periods eating away at their time.

Limited medical assistance is permitted, too.

A doctor and a nurse dispense ibuprofen, pop blisters when necessary and even give shots of lidocaine to ailing tendons (a small dose that is meant to get a faltering competitor moving and does not last long).

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Steve Hendricks broke a rib when he fell off his bike on the third day. That was not enough to force him to quit; that only happened after he awoke from a nightmare only to find that it did not end when he opened his eyes.

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Turner’s considerable supporting cast provided him with plenty of food and medical supplies during the race. “This is the most I will ever be pampered in my life,” he said.

Competitors are tested before the race for performance-enhancing drug use and, if a course record is set, afterward, too.

Steve Kirby, the race director at U.S.A. Ultra Triathlon, which oversees the Anvil and other endurance triathlons, acknowledged the testing protocols were not as stringent as those of Ironman and other more famous races, but Anvil is a lower-key, lower-rent event, he said.

“I know we go waayyyy beyond the other races in the amount of medical care we provide to keep the racers going,” Kirby said in an email. “Most of the others, they would be pulled from the race and patched up and sent home. We are a different breed ;-).”

Most of the finishers are patched up and sent home, too — with festering blisters, stress fractures, warped tendons and other injuries.

Dr. Martin Hoffman, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at University of California, Davis, who is an ultramarathon competitor and researcher, said such short-term damage was well known. Less understood are the long-term consequences.

Ultra-endurance athletes appear to have an increased rate of cardiac arrhythmias, or unusual heartbeats, most likely because of scarring of the heart known as fibrosis. But what, if any, danger that poses has been hard to pin down, Hoffman said.

“Exactly why the fibrosis occurs probably isn’t understood, but seems to be an adaptive response to this sort of exercise,” he said.

These ultratriathletes, however, tend not to dwell on the wear and tear of their bodies, at least once the race is done.

“I know this is not good for my body,” said Jay Lonsway, a urologist who completed the quintuple. “But it is good for my soul.”

It is clearly not an undertaking for the uninitiated.

To qualify, a competitor must have finished at least a double Ironman-length race, yet here was Jerome Libecki, 46, doing his first-ever triathlon. He had sort of slipped into the race — although he had done other endurance events, he needed a friend to persuade Kirby to let him in.

His triathlon inexperience showed: About 300 miles into the bike leg, after a friend took a harder look at his bike, he realized he needed to shift into a higher gear.

“I was just pedaling,” Libecki said.

A few competitors privately resented his presence, an errant entrant in a race that wants to be taken seriously. But most cheered Libecki on, astonished at his grit and determination.

By the “run” — for him and many others, it eventually slowed to a walk — Libecki was the one who hobbled on like the giant insect with makeshift crutches.

“This is the last thing I figured would happen,” he said at 3 a.m., panting and sweating. But still he vowed to go on.

Not long after, his friend Frank Fumich, who competed in the race last year, chronicled Libecki’s effort on Facebook.

“He literally went until he HAD to stop and lay down in the middle of the road, unable to go another step,” he wrote above a picture of Libecki flat on his back with his improvised walking sticks arrayed like a cross, “as close to symbolizing what might have happened if he didn’t stop. I just couldn’t encourage him to continue anymore.”

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Jepson approached the finish line with his wife, Amanda, after nearly 105 hours of swimming, biking and running. He won his division, besting a Belgian marathon runner, Johan Desmet.

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Turner, who hoped to complete 60 ultratriathlons every six days for his 60th birthday, was unable to finish five in five days.

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Michael Ward napped in the back of an S.U.V. during the second day of the race. He managed to complete the course.

Breaking Mind and Body

But even in the grip of exhaustion, there was a thirst for competition. Libecki and Turner, in their stooped gaits, still eyed each other as they passed, if in a last-man-standing kind of way.

People race to win, after all. And as if the physical demands of such a contest are not enough, some resort to psychological warfare. They misinform one another about whether they intend to nap, or they press on when they see a rival catching a snooze. They burst into a sprint when they see another competitor walking, to draw him or her further into exhaustion. Some methodically plot when to give their all and when to hold back.

Dolph Hoch IV, 52, a former military sniper, won the one-per-day quintuple division in 74 hours 54 minutes 17 seconds, beating five other competitors (including two who quit).

Unlike the other racers, Hoch conserved enough energy to complete his Day 4 (14:25:04) and Day 5 (14:46:31) races faster than he had done Day 1 (14:59:21).

“The first day, I was getting lapped on the bike,” he said after the race, his thighs now “screaming.” “Fifth day, I had the fastest split. They had no idea I was saving my spin.”

(In my book, he also won best food trick, as the one who let the sausage sandwich dissolve in his mouth to his delight, if that is the word.)

The most grinding competition, however, was between David Jepson and Johan Desmet.

It was not quite a “Rocky”-like spectacle, but with Jepson, 40, looking to be falling apart at times, it did take on that feeling. At a rest stop, he threw down his bike helmet in frustration over cramps that had left him unable to hold his head up and nearly led to a crash.

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Some competitors privately resented the presence of the inexperienced Libecki in the race, but most cheered him on. On the second day, his neck already showed signs of sunburn.

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The pain did not end with the race for Hoch, who had blisters lanced after winning the 1x5 division. Competitors also reported having shin splints and bruised feet. One coughed up blood.

But with reassuring words from his wife, Jepson somehow regained his footing on the run despite a multitude of maladies: a “golf-ball-sized” blood blister on his foot he eventually popped, a shin splint, ankle tendons so sore they needed to be stabilized by duct tape, and bruising and chafing on the bottoms of his feet that made every step searing. Running was not much of an option anymore.

“I got a good lead, no point in killing it,” he said, watching as Desmet trotted past.

“I’m over this,” Jepson added. “I like double Ironmans because you can actually race them to the end.”

Desmet, 49, who is Belgian and a marathon runner, kept up an efficient gait for a good amount of the run and rarely complained about his ordeal despite the blisters and sores on his feet. One of them, a race nurse concluded, was from the bite of an insect that had gotten inside his shoe.

“You’re not drinking enough,” interrupted his wife, Helene, who served as his only crew member, handing him water during a late-evening break.

“You always say that,” he said, taking a sip.

Helene was ready for the race to be over. And so was he. After six years of ultra-racing, he was planning to pursue other adventures.

“It’s a pretty selfish sport, with the training and racing,” Desmet said later. “She’s been putting up with this for close to seven years.”

In the end, Jepson won the continuous division with a time of 104:47:39.

Desmet, still on the course, realized the best he could do was second place.

“I am going to be first loser,” he cracked.

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Kathy Roche-Wallace and Jay Lonsway during their final laps on the fifth day of the race. Both made it to the finish.

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Those who finished the race, like Jepson, banged an anvil five times to commemorate their achievement. He made it to the finish on ankles supported by duct tape.

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Competitors who could not finish the race, like Libecki, who recovered at a friend’s home, each faced their failures in their own way.

Nourishing the Soul

The day after their agony ended, the competitors milled about a winery near the park for the awards ceremony. Turner beamed.

Although he had not finished by the cutoff time, he, like other competitors, seemed buoyed by the experience and waxed philosophical over the whole endeavor: how we as a species need to challenge ourselves, how we do not know our limits until we search for them.

Steve Hendricks, who had coughed up blood and had the nightmare and hallucination of the Pokémon character, drew gasps when he told the gathering he had broken a rib on the third day. He fell off his bike while fumbling with a cookie and his odometer, and the lingering effects made finishing the race impossible.

Hill, who had tried to talk me into doing an Ironman, was the top female finisher in the continuous division (117:46:42) and kept up a smiling demeanor almost the entire time, to the bafflement of everyone else.

“I never laughed so hard at any race in my life,” she told the gathering.

If Turner had regrets, he kept them to himself. He had dedicated this effort to his mother, who had recently died. Near the end of the race, he scrawled her name on his arm. And he relished the outpouring of affection from his supporters, who showed up in response to “Will needs help” texts.

“When you are humbled by a race, you realize what the purpose is here,” he said. “In managing to dig so deep, you discover who you are.”

In front of him was a table full of Anvil Quintuple bumper stickers. But he would not be buying one. He felt a tinge of disappointment.

“But that’s my ego talking,” he said. “The ego wants a perfect race. You get in this to feed your ego or nourish your soul.”